A World of Names

Mariana Ianelli

Translated by: Eloína Prati dos Santos

Artwork by Alfredo Aquino

There is no
news from Ghardaia. We do not know what
life is like in Sandoa. There must be a starry sky in Marbat, a dazzling woman
in Kandalaksha, the soul of a poet in Jayapura. It may be that to this day each
person in the Banks Islands uses a private song as a letter of recommendation
to the afterlife. Some delicateness must exist in Nanjing, some pleasure in
Puerto Deseado, some fresh late afternoon breeze in Buenaventura, small but
extraordinary things that do justice to the beauty of these names.

What we
know of little towns, islands and villages which suddenly occupy the world news
is something else. We learn about Leogane, Port Prince and Carrefour because
the earth moved there and their wound of misery was unraveled to everyone’s
eyes. We remember Beslan because the name evokes a massacre and one hundred and
eighty six candles alight, one for each child. News from the Island of Honshu
arrives after a tsunami occurred there. We know of Strasshof since a girl
disappeared on her way to school and reappeared, flying from captivity, more
than eight years later. Dogo Nahawa would very probably remain a village hidden
in a map if hundreds of field workers had not been hacked open by knives there.
Nor would we have heard this soon about Abbottabad if twenty soldiers had not
descended there with their machine guns one Monday at dawn.

When these
previously unknown musical names become the talk of the day it is not due to
their cherry gardens, their peacefulness, their harvest songs, their dark or
white lands. They are names pronounced because of an excess on a worldwide
scale. Not because they speak of those little but extraordinary things which whisper
that there is no world. There are worlds.

Mariana Ianelli

Mariana Ianelli is a poet, essayist and
literary critic from São Paulo with an M.A. in Literature and Literary
Criticism. She has contributed to
anthologies, literary journals, and newspapers and has published several books.
Treva Alvorada (Illuminuras, 2010) received an Honorary Mention for the
Casa de Las Americas Prize.

Eloína Prati dos Santos

Eloína
Prati dos Santos has aPhD
in English from SUNY Buffalo and has taught at the Federal Universities of
Porto Alegre and Rio Grande, in Rio Grande do Sul. She is a specialist in American, Canadian and Amerindian literatures. She was also guest editor,
with Sonia Torres, of ellipse Brasil-Canada, no. 84-85 (2010,
Fredericton, New Brunswick).